Joe Rios

Name: Joseph Rios, nicknamed "Joe"

Gender: Male

Age: 18

Grade: 12

School: Bayview Secondary School

Hobbies and Interests: Comic books, art, writing.

Appearance: Joe Rios is a Hispanic man that stands at 6'2". His skin is light brown, and his hair is black. He is not very muscular or athletic, but he is not overweight either; he has a very solidly average build, and weighs 183lbs. His hair is styled as a short, wide, curly mohawk. He is clean-shaven. He has dark brown eyes. His facial features are indistinct and vaguely European, due to his half-Argentinian heritage; he also has a small lip ring. He usually wears tight-fitting shirts and blue jeans, with a specific liking of Wrangler jeans. As far as footwear is concerned, he has one pair of Nike Air Force running shoes and one pair of Vans Checkervans Widow skate shoes, which he alternates between. The most distinctive feature of his clothing is a leather jacket that he frequently wears.

Biography: Joseph Ryan Rios was born an only child on January 23, 1990, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Pablo and Maria Rios. His father, Pablo, is the son of Argentinian immigrants, while his mother, Maria, is a Hispanic "mutt" who does not identify as any specific nationality. Pablo is a purchasing agent at a steel corporation, whereas Maria was a bartender at a gentleman's club in Albuquerque; she quit her job shortly after they had Joseph. His early life was, to say the least, uninteresting; he visited relatives frequently, and moved around America about once every year and a half due to his father being transferred around. Finally, when Joseph was nine, his family moved to St. Paul and decided to stay put for as long as possible, in order to make his adolescence (and what was left of his childhood) go much more smoothly. This required Pablo to take a pay cut, but it was not nearly significant enough to change their decision.

His love of comic books began when he picked up the first issue of Spider-Man: Identity Crisis at a bookstore when he was 8; he soon became a frequent customer of the comics section of the nearest bookstore wherever he lived. The life stories of Rob Liefeld and Jim Shooter, as talentless as they were (in Joe's view), soon inspired him to take up a pencil and paper and learn to draw in the hopes that he, too, could break into the business on his own. He also refined his writing skills as much as possible; he, naturally, thinks his writing is good, although outside opinions vary. Recently, he has taken somewhat of a dislike to mainstream comics due to how utterly awful Countdown to Final Crisis and One More Day were, although he did like Sinestro Corps War and 52 greatly.

When he was 10, Pablo got in a car accident while taking Joe to school; Joe was uninjured, but Pablo's arm was shattered. Since shortly before the accident, Joe was being a bratty child and distracting Pablo, and since the wound left Pablo's arm useless due to severe tendon damage, he felt extreme amounts of guilt for the accident; he still does, as a matter of fact. As a result of this, he has always been an extremely dutiful son, which has merited quite a bit of pride from Pablo and Maria.

His high school life has been overall uneventful. Like most people his age, he merely exists. He hangs out with many people of all types; this has the result of making him reasonably well liked by everyone that knows him, but also leaving him without any close friends to depend on. This works to his favor and works against him at the same time, in a sense; while no one is specifically out to get him, he also doesn't have anyone he can confide in whenever he has a personal issue. He sees himself essentially as he is; he is not narcissistic or egotistical, and he doesn't have any major self-loathing except over the whole father-car-accident bit. He does not seek out groups, but if he thinks that the members of one would benefit from his joining, he will happily join one. He does not mind his role in the school, and in fact sees the alternatives as worse; in Joe Rios' opinion, it's much better to have a lot of people that you somewhat trust and vice-versa, than only a few people that you trust with almost everything.

He is something of a brain; he has always made good grades in school (not straight A's, but A's and B's), and he is in mostly honors classes at Bayview, as well as an AP Art - Multimedia course. He isn't a fan of English classes, as they almost never let him exercise his skill at creative writing and instead try to strangle him with endless MLA formatting and book dissection, but he likes math and science due to their relative ease, as in those two courses the focus is more on actually learning material than impressing your teacher. He is indifferent to history, since it's the only class he can truly breeze through; in his other courses, he has to at least stay awake and pay attention, but in history, he can simply doze off or talk to the people around him, whichever's more important at the time, and still make an A due to the relative banality of the class. While all of his others at least have him learning new material each year, history merely goes back over material he already knows, but in greater detail.

While he is no bodybuilder, he does enjoy staying healthy, and since obesity runs in his mother's side of the family, he exercises more frequently than most in order to stay somewhat in shape. This also leads him to take "yo momma" jokes more personally than most of his peers, especially if they involve his mother's weight; one of the only times he's ever gotten in a fight was when a particular bully continued to press that issue. Joe rather profoundly won, although since both parties were seven, neither party did any actual damage to the other beyond bruises and a black eye on the bully.

Advantages: Joe is rather intelligent. He has no real enemies, and if someone on the island knows him, chances are they think he's okay. He is reasonably healthy and in shape. He plays well in groups.

Disadvantages: Joe almost never fights, so he probably could not hold his own against someone who does it more often. He has no real close friends, meaning he is at a disadvantage compared to someone who is deeply involved in a clique as he will have no immediate allies. Based on his past, he may be more prone to getting survivor's guilt, meaning that once SotF starts and the body count begins to pile up, he may become a suicide risk.

Designated Number: Male student no. 124

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Designated Weapon: Egyptian Scythe

Conclusion: An average Joe with average hobbies and an average personality. ...I love it. The average ones always end up surprising me! I'm hoping he'll use that pretty little scythe to slice up some of his classmates, but I sort of doubt it... Sort of.

'The above biography is as written by Wicked Icon. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Wicked Icon

Kills: Mike Maszer, Alan Rickhall

Killed By: Reiko Ishida

Collected Weapons: Egyptian Scythe (assigned weapon), Naginata (taken from Alan Rickhall and fashioned into a short sword of sorts)

Allies: Cisco Vasquez

Enemies: None

Mid-game Evaluation:

Post-Game Evaluation:

Memorable Quotes:

Other/Trivia
Joe is tied with Annaliese Hansen, R.J. Lowe, Peter Siu, and Garry Villette for being rolled the most times in V4; 4 times in all.


 * 1st roll: Swap Card used, Rose Codreanu dying instead.
 * 2nd roll: Nullified by GeneralGoose.
 * 3rd roll: Nullified by WickedIcon.
 * 4th roll: Was not saved.

Threads
Below is a list of threads that contain Joe, in chronological order.

Pre-Game:
 * Burger Time
 * Running Free
 * Enjoy the Movie

V4:
 * All That I've Ever Known
 * Too Late
 * Burn the Louvre
 * The Long Road Home
 * Anthem for Doomed Youth
 * The Lost Boys
 * Endings & Beginnings
 * To Die Hating Them, That Was Freedom
 * Gravemakers and Gunslingers
 * So Give Me Something To Believe
 * Vitriol
 * Never To Be Found
 * Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Joe Rios. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Joe's another fun character who went under the radar. He wasn't a very nice guy, but he also never really made it to total villainy. Joe started out as a pragmatist, indulging the delusions of Cisco Vasquez in order to manipulate him. Joe basically started buying into his own hype, though, and slid further and further into morally questionable choices, culminating in his killing of Mike Maszer.

Joe didn't become a full player after that, though. He was somewhat distraught by his actions, going so far as to decide that death might be the right choice. He found purpose, however, in assisting Aston Bennett. This was a very interesting reversal of roles; at the start of the game, Joe took on an assistant willing to do anything if only it gave him purpose, and yet in the end Joe finds himself making this same choice. I actually wish he'd lasted a little longer. Joe had a lot going for him, and provided a consistently interesting read. - MurderWeasel
 * Joe’s first thread was a bit of a rough start. His character, though still trying to find his voice, seemed likeable and interesting. However, though not his handler’s fault, he runs into an issue which is pretty common with newcomers to roleplays that have been running for a while. He unfortunately found himself in a thread with a few characters with very strong established relationships to each other, and no real connection to him. Predictably, they don’t want very much to do with him, and his interaction with them is fairly limited. Thankfully, he gets a text message from one of the handler’s other characters inviting him out of the thread into a one-shot transition scene before heading to the movies. The thread at the movies is fairly crowded and again, his characters don’t end up interacting much with anyone but each other. It was rather sad to see the lack of any relationship built up at this stage, since relationships between two characters handled by the same person never really have satisfying resolutions on island, though the small tidbits we get of his personality are interesting. I also liked the continuity of his pregame threads, taking place on the same day, with the character explicitly moving from place to place over the course of his posts. It was a pragmatic use of the limited time he had to spend in pregame, given the circumstances, it’s just a shame it happened to be in V4, the version with perhaps the longest and most intricate pregame in SOTF history.

Predictably, his first thread is a little difficult to read. Not because of him, specifically, but because Day 1 threads in main versions are almost consistently massively overcrowded, with a total of ten characters participating in this particular one. Thankfully, Joe’s internal narrative mainly focuses on Cisco, again showing a valuable pragmatism in writing that makes his work feel much tighter and easier to read than would be usual for such a thread. I don’t really buy how quickly he seems to catch on to Cisco’s delusions, though it’s no more unrealistic than Cisco’s handler’s usual schtick of having his characters lose touch with reality immediately upon waking up on the island, and I can overlook it for the interesting dynamic that it creates between the characters. Joe’s almost sociopathic lack of regard for the wellbeing of those around him clashes a bit with the more sensitive, awkward nature of the personality displayed in his pregame threads, but I won’t be too harsh on that. I would have liked to see something of a transition into this mindset rather than a sharp u-turn. Though Joe seems getting a bit more of his humanity back after finding out that his crush had died during the announcements in the next thread, his empathy still barely seems to extend much further than people named either “Joe Rios” or “Rose Codreanu”.

His next few threads are reminiscent of his first pregame thread. He enters after the action has already begun, and is forced to take on the role of a detached observer, with little interaction between him and the other characters in the thread. It’s rather sad, in a way, that no matter where his character goes, it becomes quickly clear that he’s not wanted there, and a couple characters explicitly attempt to ignore him when he does speak.

With such an experience, it’s no wonder that Joe develops a death wish. It’s seems to me that the handler is rather bored with the character by the time he ends up participating in the inactive kill of Mike Maszer. That said, the direction he takes the character from that point is fairly interesting, and the standoff between him and Alan Rickhall in “To Die Hating Them, That Was Freedom”, is definitely the highlight of his arc. I really enjoyed his storyline from here on out, with his desperate desire to find some sort of a purpose on the island contrasting poignantly with the inaction displayed earlier in the game. In the end, he finds himself as he began, a follower, though with a clear sense of what he plans to do with the little remaining time he has left in his life. His final thread was fantastic, with a very enjoyable fight scene between him and Reiko Ishida and some touching final moments with Aston Bennett after Reiko flees the scene.

Overall, the question of whether I would recommend Joe Rios is a difficult one. The final third of his time on the island is very solid, with two extremely well written threads, in particular, and interesting interactions with other members of the cast. However, a great deal of his earlier threads are fairly uninteresting, as far as he is concerned. I would feel bad criticizing him for that, as that issue is primarily due to OOC concerns, though the issue still stands that a great deal of his character arc is a tough slog to get through. If you are willing to fight through all of that, you’ll find an interesting character, somewhat hampered by his handler’s inexperience, though a great read nevertheless. I’ll have to come down on the side of giving him a positive recommendation, as I feel like the good parts of his story are much more good than the bad parts are bad, and I’d like to see more people exposed to the underappreciated character. --Skraal